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October 21, 2008
Playing The Blame Game
It's always fun watching conservatives try to find someone to blame when odds are they're the reason things got screwed up in the first place. Today Stantis grapples with the financial crisis, with typical results.
First he tries to blame the loan officer - but Conservative Carmen explains that away by saying "he just sold the stinky loan." I've long said that's part of the problem: people treated their loan officers and mortgage brokers like they were doctors who were compelled to do what's best for the client, but in reality they're more like used car salesman doing whatever they can to make money.
Next up: blame the banks. Nope, Carmen tells us, they just made the loan. Because they bear no responsibility in figuring out if these loans can ever be paid back. Stantis then glosses over the whole part where the banks repackaged these bad loans over and over again and sold them to each other and a nice profit.
How about Wall Street? Carmen doesn't answer, because she's upset that nobody wants to take responsibility. That's right - in George W. Bush's America, a conservative can't believe that someone won't take responsibility for this mess. Let that soak in a bit, while I try to find who we can blame for invading Iraq, torturing our enemies, and Osama bin Laden still running around free.
Ultimately I think Stantis is like all the other conservatives, who want to blame it on poor people and minorities. They should have known better, the government shouldn't have forced banks and Fannie and Freddie to make loans to them, blah blah blah. The usual "blame the poor brown people" because lord knows none of them are "real Americans" like Sarah Palin would say.
I'll just refer back to a Shrubville post I put up a few weeks ago (you know, when this was a big story) as a bit of a refresher course in understanding where things went wrong.
It's a shame that Winslow didn't blame John "Keating 5" McCain and Phil Gramm - I would have loved to have seen Carmen's response to them being accused of having anything to do with this.
Oh, and about the Gold Standard? Who was our wise and wonderful president who took us off it because we were up to our eyeballs in debt thanks to another war of choice? That's right, Richard M. Nixon in 1971. Thanks Republicans - is there anything you can't screw up?
